Short Wave - 10 Years After Flint, The Fight To Replace Lead Pipes Continues

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Ten years ago, Flint, Mich. switched water sources to the Flint River. The lack of corrosion control in the pipes caused lead to leach into the water supply of tens of thousands of residents. Pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha recognized a public health crisis in the making and gathered data proving the negative health impact on Flint's young children. In doing so, she and community organizers in Flint sparked a national conversation about lead in the U.S. water system that persists today. Today on the show, host Emily Kwong and science correspondent Pien Huang talk about the state of Flint and other cities with lead pipes. Efforts to replace these pipes hinge on proposed changes to the EPA's Lead and Copper Rule. Have questions or comments for us to consider for a future episode? Email us at [e-mail] — we'd love to hear from you!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwaver's Emily Kwong here. So 10 years ago, Dr. Mona, Hannah Atisha, was a pediatrician at Hurley Medical Center living in Flint, Michigan. The city was near bankruptcy, and to save money, Flint decided to switch water sources from Lake Huron to the Flint River on April 25, 2014. We had greenish and brownish water, and it smelled weird, and he was giving people's rashes. and they were losing hair. And families in Flint kept telling her something's not right with the water. They were asking, was it okay to use this tap water to mix their baby's formula?

State and city officials said there was nothing to worry about. And Mona told her patients the same thing. For a year and a half, I was telling my patients that, of course, everything's okay. Like, how could our drinking water not be okay? Like, this is America. It is the 21st century. All the folks in charge, despite all these concerns, were saying everything was okay. But everything was not okay.

Over a glass of wine, one of Mona's high school friends who used to work at the EPA, implored her to look into this issue. And she literally stared me down. She's like, Mona, it doesn't have corrosion control. The Flint water system lacked something important called corrosion control. Corrosion control changes the chemistry of the water to make it less likely to leach lead from the pipes. And without that corrosion control, the lead in Flint's pipes got into the water supply. And that is the moment that I heard about the possibility of lead being in the water, and that's the moment my life changed. We need water to survive. It's a medical and public health necessity,

and the younger you are, the more our bodies are made up of water. The CDC says that no amount of lead in children is safe. For kids, lead poisoning can have serious consequences. It can damage their brains and nervous systems, causing learning and behavioral problems, and issues with hearing and speech down the line. Mona saw crisis in the making and began looking for any data she could on kids' blood-led levels. And in September 2015, a year and a half after that water switch, she went public with her results. This research is concerning. These results are concerning. showing that the number of children in Flint with elevated levels of lead in their blood had gone up. And when our national guiding organizations tell us primary prevention is the most important thing,

and that lead poisoning is potentially irreversible, then we have to say something. At first, the state dismissed her findings. But Mona Hannah Atisha was right. It's been 10 years, and the city's water quality has improved. Flint switched back to Lake Hur. on, and thousands of lead pipes have been replaced. But there is still a lot of work to be done in Flint to replace them all. The truth of the matter is there are cities and towns all over the country facing their own issues with water quality, aging infrastructure, and inadequate laws

that don't protect people from lead poisoning. Flint is an example of how speaking up with science can turn a crisis around. So 10 years on, we're bringing in science reporter Ping Huang to focus on those trying to stop another crisis in another city. Chicago. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. So to help us understand the emerging lead crisis in Chicago, we've got science reporter Ping Huang in the studio. Hi, Ping. Hey, Emily.

It's great to see you. And it's also so cool that you got to talk to Dr. Mona. It was so cool. And Mona is still on the front lines of trying to make life better for kids in Flint, where more than two-thirds of children live in politics. poverty. She's the founding director of the pediatric public health initiative, which connects families to programs and services to alleviate that poverty. One of them, RX kids, gives new moms in Flint a no-strings-attached check of $7,500. In a city that so many folks know as a city that failed kids, is a city that's learning, that's leading with science, that's leading with prevention to promote

kind of the health of development of kids by boldly kind of eradicating infant poverty. I asked her what she thought of the situation in Chicago, and she didn't hold back on her thoughts and feelings. Chicago has a long history of lead advocates, but also a long history of lead misuse. Chicago continued to use lead in their service lines until it was restricted in 1986. And built into the code, if you wanted water from the, the main, you were mandated to use lead in your plumbing. So Chicago has the most lead lines than any other city in our nation. And, you know, if you respect the science of lead, if you understand that it has no safe level, lead should not be the straw that is delivering our drinking

water to so many children and families. And Emily, that lead is still in the water even now. So there was a recent JAMA pediatric study that found that most children under the age of six in Chicago are probably drinking leaded water. Most children. Wow. Okay. And that research was spearheaded by Benjamin 1 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So he is an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering there. And his focuses on data science and environmental justice. In this case in particular, he's got personal ties to the topic. So I'm from Chicago, and those of us in Chicago, we've known for a long time that most of our pipes are made out of lead. Including the house that his parents live in. In Chicago, there are around 400,000 homes that have lead pipes connecting the water main to the house. And Ben wanted to know, what does that actually mean for people drinking water from those taps?

So how did Ben figure this out, like that so many kids were drinking leaded water? What data did he use? Yeah, so it's rooted in the fact that Chicago has a free, water testing program. It's for people who want to test their tap water for lead. And so far, this program has run about 38,000 tests. People have voluntarily collected water samples from their home, sent them to the city. And while these tests are free, Ben says not everybody uses them. We found that the people who took those tests, they're more likely to be in white neighborhoods, like wealthier neighborhoods, and also neighborhoods that are less likely to have lead in the first place.

Oh, so there was a huge sampling bias in this data. Right, exactly, and he had to correct for that. So he took that data and he combined it with other sources of data. So data on local health, demographics, survey results on how many people use tap versus filtered or bottled water as their main drinking source. And then, with the help of machine learning, he and his team figured out an estimate. They figured out that 68% of young children in Chicago are drinking tap water with lead. On top of that, you know, we're seeing black and Hispanic neighborhoods. are more likely to have lead exposure, but also less likely to be tested for lead.

But the federal government does allow for some lead to be in the water. So at what point does the environmental protection agency say, this is too much lead in the water. This is the cutoff. The EPA does have something called the lead and copper rule. And this rule sets an action level for lead at 15 parts per billion. Okay. And when water systems find that amount of lead in the water, they're supposed to initiate that corrosion control that we mentioned earlier. So is Chicago in compliance with this 15 parts per billion

limit? Yeah. I mean, the city says that it is and they've done everything that they're supposed to be doing. But there are other places that might not be. Okay. I talked to Elizabeth Sutherland. She's formerly with the EPA. And she says that audits from the agency actually showed that in some 90% of these cases where there are access levels of lead in the water, those cases never even got report. to the federal government. This was probably the worst reported and enforced regulation in the history of the Dr. Dr.C. B.A. program. Yeah, and many researchers and advocates say the rule was weak and inadequate. Now, even the EPA itself says that those regulations need to change. So last year, the EPA proposed the lead and copper rule improvements, and those are expected to be finalized by October this fall. Okay, I'm pulling up their website now. So let's see what could happen if these proposed changes to the lead and copper rule were to take effect. One proposed rule change is that every water system in the country produce a map of where their lead pipes are. That could be huge. Yeah, totally. Also on this list are calls for improving water sampling and lowering that lead action level from 15 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion. Okay. There are some people who think that. it should be even less than that, but that would significantly lower the trigger level for lead.

Okay. And then the last thing, requiring the vast majority of water systems to replace all their lead pipes within the next 10 years. And many people are saying because the lead protections for the drinking water haven't really been working, this is what we really need to fix the problem. But you said the vast majority, and I want to point that out because that's a really important point. because in that proposed rule, Chicago gets an exemption because it simply has too many pipes. The regulation as it's proposed is really concerned with what's realistic and feasible. And so what the EPA is saying is that it's realistic to expect a city to replace around 10,000 lead service lines a year. And this is based on what other cities have already done. So since most cities have under 100,000 pipes, they should be able to make that deadline. But Chicago, with its 400,000 lead pipes, would get around 40 years or more to switch out their pipes. Wow.

And that 40-year timeline has community advocates like Shaquina Perry with the Natural Resources Defense Council pretty upset. That's decades, that's generations of children and adults, you know, consuming lead-contaminated water. It's incomprehensible to tell a resident

that they have to wait that long for safe drinking water. Shekina and others are really pushing. for the EPA to close up those exemptions when they issue the final rule in the fall. So to be determined, really, how this rule might impact Chicago in the long run. Yeah. Meanwhile, people have to grapple with the reality of their lead pipes. Remember when I said earlier that Ben's parents have lead pipes? Well, a few weeks ago, Ben's mom got sick with symptoms that were consistent with lead poisoning. Oh, yikes. Yeah. And it turns out that a water may near

their home had burst and the city went out to fix it. But they didn't tell his parents right away that they were doing it. And in the meantime, his mom was drinking the tap water. So Ben helped his parents order a test for lead in their water and he walked them through the process of collecting multiple bottles of water for the samples. I know this, right? Because I'm an expert on this, but like, this is probably happening to like all over the city. Or I know this is happening all over the city. Ben thinks that the city could be doing a much better job of getting more people to test for lead in their water. Right now, less than 10% of households have gotten tested. And he also says that they could do a much better job of providing lead filters to everyone who's at risk of lead poisoning.

Yeah. I mean, all of this just affirms what Dr. Mona, Hannah, Atisha, was saying earlier about public policy needing to keep up with science, right? Totally. I mean, it's just, I think this is the real legacy of Flint in many respects, this acknowledgement that people everywhere deserve to know what's in their water and deserve to be informed on what to do if the water is compromised. Yeah, Emily, you know, the safe drinking water act was passed 50 years ago, but there's still a ways to go to make sure that all tap water in the U.S. is safe. If listeners are worried, they can take a couple simple steps to figure out what their pipes are made out of.

They can test their water like Ben did, and if there's lead, they can filter it out. Ping Wong, science reporter, thank you for walking us through where we are at this moment in our country's history when it comes to lead and water and human health. That's been really good to talk to you. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by me and Ping. Patrick Murray was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I am Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.